The World's fastest Indian (2005)

Mit Herz und Hand

Interview with Roger Donaldson

With movies like No way out, Thirteen Days, Cocktail and Species under his belt, it's hard to believe that only few people know Roger Donaldson, the australian-born director from New Zealand who made all these films. His newest work is a project close to his heart The World's fastest Indian. With OutNow.CH Donaldson talks about Burt Munro the legendary biker that inspired him, Anthony Hopkins who took on the lead role in spite of troubled past they share and the beginnings of his career, which coincides with the birth of a proper film industry in New Zealand.

» Das Interview in deutscher Sprache.

OutNow.CH (ON): You have met the actual Burt Munro, the person that inspired The World's fastest Indian.

Roger Donaldson (RD): This movie really spans my whole filmmaking career. It started out as a documentary that I made in 1971. It was the second film I'd ever made. I had a filmmaking partner who was into motorbikes and influenced me. So I had a motorbike at the time, an Indian. We heard about this old boy who lived down the very tip of the South Island of New Zealand and we went down to see him. I remember the night we got there. We came to the address and all there was was a shed. The light went on and sure enough there was Burt Munro and he was very excited to see us. In the shed were just a single light bulb and a bed in a corner. This guy was living with his motorbike. He wheeled the motorbike out and started the engine. It screamed and we could tell that it was something special. The lights went on in the neighbours' places and people started yelling abuse over the back fence. Burt was as deaf as a post and didn't hear any of it. That's how I met the guy. We then followed him to Bonneville in the USA and we had this great adventure of making a documentary film about him. We witnessed how this character has become the movie; just a great wonderful outgoing personality that seemed to find the best in people. He had a great collection of stories. It was just a really entertaining guy at several levels. When he died I could never forget the old bugger. When I started making movies I just thought what a wonderful movie this could be.

ON: But why a feature film after so many years?

RD: Lots of things start out as one thing, and then your own fascination your own insight into it grows. This whole going to Bonneville with him was for me quite an extraordinary story at the time. Then I felt like trying to find a subject for a film that I would really know as an insider. Something I've got personal feelings for and I'd do it with a passion. That is different then just getting another script from Universal and saying I'll make that now.

ON: What fascinated you in particular about Munro?

RD: He had enormous odds to pull of. When people do extraordinary things against the odds there is a certain pleasure that you take from.

ON: More than 30 years have passed between the documentary and the feature film. Why did it take so long?

RD: I started writing this script in 1979 and that's a while a go too. I wrote lots of different versions of the script. I don't think I got any more insight into it. I managed to define for myself what it was that I really wanted to say in the film and how. Earlier versions of the script were efforts to be more commercial than this one. Previous version had sort of two characters. It was more of a relationship movie than an adventure movie. Then I finally came to the conclusion that his relationship was with a bike and not with anybody else. Once I didn't fight that anymore I felt liberated. I was also determined that it's not going to be a movie about motorcycles. It should have been a movie about life.

ON: What was the hardest thing about getting the right adaptation of the truth?

RD: Nothing was hard. It was just a tough time. I mean, it was frustrating but it never got hard. I was never sitting there and just staring at a blank page. I was still writing when I started shooting. Once I had Anthony Hopkins on board I had a collaborator as well, you know, there was stuff that happened there just because Anthony and I were collaborating and we happened to be on the same page. We were talking a lot about our fathers when we were making this movie. There is also lot about dads in this film. Details in this film are definitely his father and not Burt Munro. Anthony puts it all together and it feels like it's Burt Munro.

ON: Anthony Hopkins also imitates the dialect of New Zealand very well.

RD: The New Zealand accent in this particular part of the country is actually quite a distinctive one. It's a New Zealand accent with a Scottish accent on top of it. It's a very unusual accent and Anthony does an amazingly good job. He has even convinced the people of this town. Invercargillites and South Islander are very proud people. They were a little appalled that a foreigner would be playing a New Zealander at first, but now they have embraced him as one of their own. He is probably an honorary citizen by now. They named the local, I don't know, the student acting programme after him, the Anthony Hopkins centre for performing arts or something.

ON: Was Anthony Hopkins the first choice? Were you not afraid that he is to powerful as an actor?

RD: I wish I'd got my documentary here to have a way to show it to you. The real guy had a strong personality and was a really charismatic person. Anthony really does catch it really convincing. In the end it's irrelevant because nobody knows who the real guy was. The movie is not a dramatised documentary. I was never there when Burt Munro picked up hitchhikers. These were all fruits of my imagination. I was taking this character that I knew and used him as a vehicle to say what I wanted to say about the world. I just used the lines and dialogs that I heard him say. He was a great character that had this collection of bonmots why one shouldn't smoke cigarettes and why riding motorbikes is important and risking your neck was fun.

ON: You met Anthony Hopkins twenty years ago.

RD: Yes, we made The Bounty together many years ago.

ON: Has he changed in a way since then?

RD: Well he wasn't as famous then as he is now, that's for sure. But he has always been a really talented actor. We had a tough time making The Bounty. We make no secret about it. We were ready to kill each other is a pretty accurate description about our relationship. But the movie turned out well, we were both proud of it. I think in retrospect we realised that the movie was so demanding that the terrible relationship we had came out of the part he was playing and my inexperience in directing stars. If you put two and two together you've got the recipe for disaster. Luckily the movie wasn't a disaster. But our relationship wasn't very good.

ON: Did it take twenty years to fix it?

RD: I think what really fixed it was probably that the movie was the closing film at the Cannes Film Festival that year. I think we both saw the movie and we both liked the film. That was the point at which we sad it was all worth it.

ON: He is an exceptional actor. Are you sometimes surprised how he can do things like that?

RD: What's great about him is that it doesn't feel like he's been working at it. He says the script a hundred times to himself and then he's got it in his head. It just comes to him. So it never feels like he's repeating lines he's learned. He is just a very creative, innovative, talented guy. What I like about his acting is the details. When you look at his eyes you always think it's real people talking and thinking and looking. You can see them finding their words. You can see them talking. I think that's his real genius. He always feels like all of the energy is coming out of him. Sometimes you see bad actors where you can feel the actor's outside looking at himself in a mirror getting the right angle. It feels very self-conscious. Anthony never feels self-conscious.

ON: It's fairly interesting that you always work with actors that became really big stars afterwards: Like Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise Kevin Costner

RD: There's more! People like Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sam Neill, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson. I love casting. I always put a lot of effort into casting and that's how you find good people.

ON: But there seems to be something about a so called star that makes him special.

RD: Yeah, I think all of the people who have a star quality about them feel a little bit unpredictable. You're always a little nervous that they flip out and give you a hard time. The nice guys don't become stars. I don't mean that in a negative way. I just mean if people are too predictable that doesn't give them that edge where the audience identifies with a monster. It's like the women always seem to be attracted to the bad boys. Why? They just seem more interesting.

ON: So who's the one with the biggest edge?

RD: Oh, I cannot tell you (laughs). Mickey Rourke perhaps.

ON: What's different in your career now than in the beginning?

RD: In the beginning you don't know where it is going. When you've done a number of movies you start to feel confident that you can start to make what you're interested in. But at the beginning you're only discovering what you're interested in. When I made my first two films I had no idea that I would ever finish up in Hollywood. It wasn't an ambition. I thought I was going to be lucky enough to make some more films in New Zealand and then I was confronted with the possibility to live in Hollywood. So I went off for this adventure in the United States and I am still there.

ON: Are you aware that you are the one who put New Zealand on the map a as film country?

RD: Sleeping Dogs was the first colour film ever made in New Zealand. So my early movies had a big impact along with the ones from a filmmaker called Geoff Murphy who was a friend of mine. I didn't do it all on my own. Filmmaking is always a collaborative exercise. And there were a lot of us who were very passionate about making films in New Zealand. Through our work being noticed and being successful we pressured the government to find a way to fund and help make more New Zealand films. There were politicians who were thinking that way too. It was group of people who suddenly thought: Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we could have the same as in Australia in New Zealand? And I was one of them.

13.02.2006 / th